In the spring of 2006, Jim Webb was not yet a rising superstar. In fact, he was late getting started and low on cash in his effort to win the Virginia Democratic primary, so an admiring Roanoke circuit clerk named Steve McGraw took pity on him and agreed to put him up when he came to southwestern Virginia to campaign. Webb quickly established himself as the model houseguest, washing everybody's chili bowls and shooting pool with McGraw over a bottle of Maker's Mark bourbon. But a worry gnawed at McGraw: The rumor about Webb was that behind the noble-war-hero facade lay a man who harbored a volatile, prideful, and possibly unmanageable anger. "I kept looking for it," confides McGraw. "He started late, with no money. He told me that during the campaign he was sleeping about four hours a night for five months, and he said, 'I just can't turn my brain off.' ... I kept saying, 'Sooner or later, something's gonna happen.'"
McGraw isn't the only person who's kept vigil waiting for Jim Webb to blow. Webb the hair-triggered hothead has become something of a legend here in Washington. Reporters pepper their Webb stories with colorful adjectives like "irascible" and "enraged," and, throughout town, he's often whispered of as though he were a mysterious specimen from a foreign and bellicose tribe. As evidence of Webb's hot streak, Washington social anthropologists point out that he switched party loyalties; that he's fond of hyperbole (he once called the Naval Academy a "horny woman's dream"); that he angrily quit his post as Reagan's Navy secretary; that he snapped at President Bush for asking after his soldier son Jimmy at a November 2006 White House party; and that his legislative aide tried to bring his loaded gun into the Capitol last spring, prompting Webb to explain cryptically that it was important "for a lot of people in the situation that I am in to be able to defend myself and my family. " (What "situation"? Does he shoot his political enemies?)